Inside USC

No Oversight Means Plenty Of Scandals

Donna Heinel probably had pretty good reason to think she would never got caught taking bribes to get students into USC.

Since around 2007, she pretty much was the only person in the athletic dept. who dealt with the admissions boards. It was her own fiefdom.

This often made her unpopular with USC coaches because she would often reject seemingly qualified candidates before even taking them to the admission board. One coach told me today how she rejected his athlete, only to have Oregon take the athlete later.

Little did these coaches know took around $1.3 million in bribes, according to the federal government.

And at the same time, Jovan Vavic was running his own operation with water polo worth more than $500,000.

I am very familiar with this admission process and saw coaches do it frequently. But they would take actual high school athletes as walk-ons who did not have the usual 4.0 GPA or amazing SAT score that seems to be required at USC these days.

One could argue all these scandals have one thing in common: No oversight.

Just like USC has an ineffective board of trustees, no full-time president and an absentee athletic director.

Here’s an example below of what Heinel did when USC admissions wanted to know why a women’s basketball recruit never played for the team.

Heinel has been charged with racketeering conspiracy as part of the wide-ranging indictment that also names actresses Lori Laughlin and Felicity Huffman. In addition to helping students get into USC as football recruits, Heinel allegedly did the same for kids positioned as basketball and crew recruits. Laughlin’s daughters were posed as crew recruits.

USC said Tuesday afternoon that Heinel, along with water polo coach Jovan Vavic, had been fired.

No oversight means plenty of scandals —-and plenty of scandals means no sports coverage. But, hey, no one can really say this stuff isn’t more interesting than Helton. For those who are not following this story, our toy acting president released a statement saying that although this scandal involves some students brought in as football players there is no indication that anyone in the program had knowledge of what was going on. Let’s REALLY hope that’s true —for the sake of a bunch of players who want to prove something (positive) in 2019.

67 — Yes, Haden& Swann. And —let’s face it— Wanda Austin. The gutsy thing for Austin to do (and the very thing I know she won’t do) is announce, “I’m not going to continue providing cover for this mess. A REAL president needs to be selected by the end of April. USC is an institution that is desperately in need of a proven leader —-someone who can salvage what is left of a once justifiably proud university.”

Thumbs up, Michael. They will need to bring in a person with strong administrative academic experience (who is almost certainly working at another university now), but this means that July or August is probably the earliest to have them on board.

It is hard to start and finish this type of search in less than 45-60 days, so they better be doing something now if they want a new person in place by summer.